


Two Sparrows

by Princip1914



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Biblical Allusions, First Kiss, Is actually Aziraphale's philosophy of history, M/M, Melancholy, Pining while fucking, References to Hamlet, Scene: Globe Theatre 1601 (Good Omens), literary analysis but make it fic, rewriting Hamlet as a romance through choice use of lines, you go too fast for me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:06:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24962725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Princip1914/pseuds/Princip1914
Summary: The play's the thing.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 56
Kudos: 141





	Two Sparrows

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Anti_kate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anti_kate/gifts).



> This fic is a gift to Anti_Kate, who has been nothing but a joy in this fandom, as well as a wonderful beta for my own work. Anti_Kate asked for “globe era, first kiss, and melancholy,” and instead got “philosophical ramblings on the indifference of God and the human condition, also Hamlet.” I am so sorry. 
> 
> This fic was beta'd by the wonderful [The Old Aquarian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOldAquarian), who is a delight to work with and always makes what I write a thousand times better.

_“Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.”  
\--Matthew 10:29_

The play had already started, but Aziraphale wasn’t paying it much attention. Aziraphale had been late for their rendezvous, and now Crowey was nowhere to be found. At least, Aziraphale thought in frustration as he stood on tiptoe, Crowley certainly had outdone himself in their bargain-- _Hamlet_ was so much of a success that he couldn’t find the blasted demon in the crush of humanity. 

All at once a familiar voice cut through the air. 

“A little more than kin and less than kind…” 

“ _Crowley_?” Aziraphale gasped and glanced up, for the first time, towards the stage. 

A familiar figure lounged insolently on the edge of the set, regal and lithe in his all-black finery. The pair of dark glasses perched on his nose only added to the aesthetic. 

Aziraphale gaped, blinked, looked again. He didn’t understand it. What was an occult entity doing, playing at being a human, playing at being another human? Aziraphale was about to give this up as one of the odd little fancies Crowley sometimes enjoyed, like participatory democracy or coppersmithing. He turned to wait out the play at the back entrance to the theater, but something in the melancholy lilt of Crowley’s voice drifting over the crowd rooted him in place. 

“But break, my heart,” Crowley lamented on stage, “for I must hold my tongue.” Aziraphale leaned in, transfixed. 

Crowley had asked him to come meet him here. That meant, Aziraphale realized belatedly, halfway through the first act, that he had _wanted_ Aziraphale to see this. But why? What possible lesson was Crowley trying to impart? 

When Will first told Aziraphale his idea for this play, Aziraphale had privately thought it might be a bit tawdry, hackneyed even, just like any half dozen other revenge fantasies by Marlowe or Kyd. But _Hamlet_ , as it turned out, was something entirely new altogether. Acceleration was buzzing like an undercurrent through the crowd. There had been thousands of years with only fire, and then bronze had been invented, and reading and writing, and then plumbing and architecture had been invented and forgotten and reinvented, and now there were all sorts of people running around with ideas about science and art and mathematics and drama. It was so very much so very quickly. Who knew what would happen in another two hundred years, or three hundred or four hundred? Humans might break the very rules of language, might start painting abstract shapes as art. They might find ways to travel incredibly quickly across the land and sea. They might even teach themselves to fly. It must be a terribly exciting time for all the humans in the crowd, but to Aziraphae it felt very fast and very reckless indeed. 

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” Crowley said on stage. It felt like he was looking straight at Aziraphale as he said it, although this was impossible; the crowd was in the way, Aziraphale could barely see the top of his red hair. 

Are there? Aziraphale wondered. The Almighty had thought of everything. Even the things Aziraphale did not know, She knew. The idea of Her omniscence had always brought him comfort in the past, but recently it had begun to stick in his breast with something like unease. 

They were always small, the things he and Crowley did for each other. After all, this past weekend had only been about stealing some cattle--a very minor sin--but Aziraphale could see, suddenly, how it could grow larger and larger if he let it. For nearly five thousand years, there had been no Arrangement at all, and then there was _alright, fine, just this once Crowley_ , and now _toss you for Edinburgh_ and _I’ll do that one for free_ \--Crowley cavorting on stage like a human--what would it be next? Crowley would hang around even more, in that dreadfully debonair way of his. Aziraphale would be tempted into asking for more favors, and then--? At this rate, by the 18th century they would be meeting weekly, by the 19th, daily. By the 20th perhaps, they would be _living together_ even, sharing wine, swapping stories about their workdays over dinner in front of the fire, and then later in the evenings--

Because that was something small, too, or at least, it had felt small when it had started. Aziraphale barely remembered the beginning--fumbling hands in the desert, the solid, welcome press of a Hell-hot body against his own. “Pleasures of the flesh, pleasures of the earth, eating, drinking, fucking, it’s all the same really,” Crowley had said, after the first time, or maybe after the fifth, or the fiftieth, and Aziraphale had believed him. It started as a small indulgence and would have kept on being a small indulgence, but Aziraphale _worried_ so very much, and the worry, which had only grown in proportion to their proximity these past few hundred years, made everything seem that much more serious. Aziraphale worried that he was doing something beyond the gaze of the Almighty. He worried that She didn’t know. He worried that She did. But, mostly, he worried that Crowley would go to Hell one day to give his regular report and not come back. 

Crowley slouched, languid and careless on the stage, doublet half opened to convey Hamlet’s descent into madness. Aziraphale tried to look at his bared chest with anything like objectivity, wondered idly if feigning madness would work when they were eventually (inevitably) found out. Perhaps that was the point of all this--perhaps Crowley was rehearsing a role, preparing to play it out to the best of his ability. 

Abruptly, Aziraphale remembered-- _I always like the funny ones better_ \--and thought with sudden fierceness: Why this role? Why not another? Who are you to decide this is a tragedy? He had half a mind to run up on stage and shake Crowley and ask him. 

(Aziraphale knew he would not ask him. Aziraphale knew he would pretend he had arrived too late and missed the play entirely when he met Crowley later.) 

As if aligned with Aziraphale’s thoughts, the play swept towards its inevitable conclusion. The young man portraying Horatio tried to talk Crowley out of a duel they both knew would lead to his death. 

“Not a whit,” Crowley said, aloof, beautiful, and refusing to back down. “We defy augury.” The scene was supposed to end there. Aziraphale remembered it, had seen it played out not two weeks ago, but Crowley kept speaking. He leaned in close to the human playing Horatio, but his eyes swept up through the crowd until he was looking straight at Aziraphale, then beyond him, at the sky over his head. 

“There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.”

At that moment, Aziraphale did not truly understand these words. In the years that followed, he would try and try to parse them out, so often in fact that all the copies of _Hamlet_ in the bookshop Aziraphale had yet to buy would have their spines broken, creased to fall open exactly in the middle of Act Five, Scene Two.

At the time, Aziraphale understood only that Crowley thought these words were important. He understood that they were not intended for the assembled audience of humans. He understood that they were quite possibly not even intended for Aziraphale himself.

(In 1862, after storming away from St James’ Park, heart in his mouth, shaken by an absurd request, Aziraphale would think _the readiness is all_ and understand a little more.) 

Here and now, amidst the press of humanity at the Globe, Aziraphale wondered if Crowley might be saying that whatever swirled between them--the push and pull of temptation and blessing, a more literal give and take that occurred infrequently, at night, with closed mouths and no words and rucked up bedclothes--that this thing was both inevitable and destructive and that there was nothing to be done but wait for it to bring them ruin. 

***

Aziraphale met Crowley at the back door of The Globe. 

“So, did you like the play?” Crowley asked, grinning. 

“I…” Aziraphale faltered. He felt hollowed out, terribly sad. “--I missed it actually. Got back from Edinburgh late. Was it any different from the last time?” 

“Oh.” There was an almost imperceptible tightening of Crowley’s smile. “Not much. How was Scotland.” 

“Not too difficult,” Aziraphale managed to say. Crowley was still wearing part of his stage makeup. The eyeliner was smudged at the corners of his eyes, his lips were unnaturally red.

“Here, I brought you this. They’re doing the most amazing things to barley and wheat up there.” Aziraphale held out a bottle of amber liquid. 

Crowley held it up to the light by the door. It was the same honey gold as his eyes, which peeked out above his smokey glasses. Aziraphale felt a sudden, desperate pain in his chest, like a sparrow trapped beneath his ribs, beating its wings fruitlessly against his throat. 

“Let’s go somewhere,” he suggested against the fluttering pressure. Crowley quirked one eyebrow up at him. Aziraphale was aware he was going off script. It was usually Crowley who tempted and wheedled, Aziraphale who eventually relented and said yes. 

“Sure, angel,” Crowley said slowly. “I’ve got some glasses in my rooms if you’d like. We could drink this together?” The liquid sloshed in the bottle. 

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, glad for the excuse, grateful he had thought of it last week in Scotland. “Yes, please.”

No lamps had been lit inside Crowley’s apartment, but it was no matter. Aziraphale had a thousand eyes and all of them could see in the dark. 

“Let me just--” Crowley said, fumbling with the whisky. Aziraphale took it, unopened from his hands and set it down on the table. 

“Do you have a bed here?” 

“Yessss,” Crowley hissed, pulling Aziraphale towards him. They stumbled into another room, then down onto a straw-stuffed mattress on the floor. There was a window in this room and light from a full moon spilled down onto Crowley’s red hair and goatee. It made him look almost ethereal. It made him look--Aziraphale thought with a beat of the wings stuck in his throat--almost like an angel. Aziraphale reached down and plucked the glasses off of Crowley’s face, tossed them aside. Crowley made no move to stop him. 

“Take your clothes off,” Aziraphale said, hands already working on the fastenings of his own doublet. 

“All of them?” 

“Yes, I-- I want to see you.” 

Crowley didn’t hesitate. He didn’t comment either on the oddness of the request after a thousand (two thousand? three thousand?) years of their hands on each other and their eyes averted. 

Aziraphale knelt over Crowley. Crowley’s wings (dark, well groomed, very dear) were barely visible to Aziraphale’s many eyes, denting the firmament the way Crowley’s body dented and pooled the sheets around him on the mattress. 

“... _the fall of a sparrow_ ,” Aziraphale murmured. 

“What was that?” Crowley asked. 

“Nothing,” Aziraphale ran a hand down Crowley’s naked side; he shivered at the touch. “Something biblical, you wouldn’t know it.” 

***

(Later, much, much later, sitting with his oldest enemy, friend, and lover beside the tarmac of a disused airbase, Aziraphale finally gave himself permission to wonder at the other part of the phrase-- _there is special providence_.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale asked, emboldened by the wine they were sharing, “what did you mean by all that...with the sparrow?” 

“What?” Crowley said, face the picture of innocence. 

“The line you added to Hamlet.”

“Thought you got there too late to watch,” Crowley took the wine from Aziraphale.

“Yes, well...I lied.” 

“Bad of you angel,” Crowley said, but he was smiling. “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall without--” 

“Yes, but--” Aziraphale interrupted. Crowley’s eyes were very yellow and very close. “But it’s quite sad, isn’t it? The Almighty just--” Aziraphale swallowed. “The Almighty lets one of the sparrows--” he tried again. “It’s just, well--I’ve never liked that verse very much at all, I’m afraid.” 

“Why don’t you like it?” Crowley asked, soft and kind, the same voice he used to remind Aziraphale he didn’t have a side anymore. 

“It might all be part of The Plan, but it’s not a very nice plan, is it?” Aziraphale said in a rush, finally putting words to something he had been afraid of for more than four hundred years. “For the sparrow who falls, I mean.” 

Crowley’s hand curled gently into his. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I like thinking about it, The Great Plan, beyond the great plan. It’s...soothing. The two sparrows get to be in the same cage after all.” 

Aziraphale tightened his grip on Crowley’s fingers. “You don’t think it’s cruel?” 

“I think it’s ineffable, angel.”)

*** 

In the light of the moon in 1603, Aziraphale did not allow himself to ask these kind of questions. In four hundred years, humans might create modern art and fly airplanes. The world might end and begin again, and he might be ready for Crowley’s answers. But for now, he allowed himself only to think of the tightness of Crowley’s body cradling his, to revel in the sweat and slide of it, in the fit of them together like a mated pair of birds in a cage. Crowley was beneath him, moaning his name in a way that should have sounded blasphemous, but felt, to Aziraphale’s divinely attuned senses, closer to prayer. Aziraphale could not allow himself to think about Providence or sparrows or The Great Plan, but he also could not stop himself from leaning down and, for the very first time in all their years of earthly pleasures, pressing his lips to Crowley’s, kissing him gently as they twined together in the dark.

**Author's Note:**

> My Hamlet obsession predates my Good Omens obsession, but for some reason (maybe because it is hard!) I have never before written fic that combines the two. 
> 
> If you would like to see David Tennant deliver the line in question, let me direct your attention to about 3:10 of [ this youtube clip.](https://youtu.be/eRsrCdxAZ6o?t=190) (Unfortunately, I think the way the director of the filmed version of Tennant's Hamlet cut this scene really detracts from the emotional punch of that line, but I digress.)
> 
> [Come stop by on tumblr](https://princip1914.tumblr.com) for more self-important literary musings about Good Omens & etc.


End file.
